You're Not Doing It Right

by Michael Ian Black

  That’s what they do. They listen to Led Zeppelin and fix cars and fight, usually with knives, brass knuckles, Chinese throwing stars, and small-caliber guns. They are a savage people. Everybody knows that. Yes, Dale is small and skinny like me, but I have no doubts concerning the outcome of any fight we may have: he will kill me.

  What if I refuse? If I back down from a fight, it will be so much worse. These guys already call me names and sometimes give me hard shoves in the hallway for no reason at all, except that I am so easy to displace, gravitationally speaking.

  I don’t know what to say or do so I just open my mouth and let the truth fall out. “I’m not going to meet you in the parking lot,” I say to Dale. I look him dead in the eye, arms at my side.

  “Why not?” he barks.

  “Because if I do you’ll beat me up.”

  “Pussy!” somebody says. Laughs all around.

  He’s right. I am a pussy. I am both a pussy and a fag, which seems like an oxymoronic combination, but somehow is not. The momentum has clearly shifted away from me and toward Dale. I can tell I will not be hanging out with the popular guys and their Pill-taking girlfriends anytime soon.

  But that’s not important right now. What’s important is getting out of here without injury. As coolly as I can, I ball up my gym clothes and shove them under my arm. Then I walk past everybody toward the big wooden door that leads from the locker room to the hallway and escape.

  “You better be there,” Dale calls.

  “I won’t be there,” I call back.

  “Faggot!” somebody else says. More laughs.

  Although my back is now to the group, I’m pretty sure they’ve heaved Dale onto their shoulders. They’ll probably host a make-out party in his honor with all those popular girls who rightfully should be mine. If Dale didn’t have sex before, he definitely will now.

  I push on the door and blend into the stream of kids rushing to class. The rest of the day is a terror-filled blur. Spanish. Art. European history. I don’t talk to anybody. Lunch: french fries with mustard and a cookie. I see Dale across the cafeteria but I don’t think he sees me. I watch him. He laughs with his burnout friends. I assume they are laughing about me. Geometry. English. I make pencil doodles on my desk. I watch the clock. The last bell rings. I spring from my chair, dash to my locker, grab my stuff, and try to get out of there as fast as I can.

  The parking lot is a dirt-packed rectangle behind the school where the upperclassmen park their cars. To avoid it, I have to take a different route to exit. Once outside, I half walk, half jog to the convoy of buses idling along the curb. I find my bus and get on and sit somewhere toward the middle, squeezing myself against the window. When it finally fills, the driver closes the hissing door, and we roll past the parking lot, where I see Dale. He stands by himself on a strip of patchy grass facing the school, watching the last trickle of students dribble from the building. As we drive off, I crane my head around, watching him shrink away to nothing.

  He confronts me the next day in chemistry. “Where were you?”

  My lab partner, Kelly, is pretty and I do not want her to know of my cowardice. She probably knows already. Everybody probably knows. I am a teenager and believe people must always be talking about me.

  “I told you I wouldn’t be there,” I say with as much confidence as I can muster, attempting to give off the air of a world-weary man who has seen much and done much and has no need for such foolishness. Does Kelly hear this in my voice? If so, she gives no sign. She never gives any sign of hearing me at all, even though we sit less than two feet away from each other for an entire year.

  “Be there today,” he says.

  “I won’t be there,” I reply.

  After he returns to his desk I blow a scornful little laugh through my nose and, bemused, shake my head at Kelly, as if to say, Such folly. But I am invisible to her because I am invisible to girls.

  He is waiting for me again in the parking lot after school, but I am tucked safely inside the bus. Our pas de deux (French term meaning “one person threatens to beat up the other person, while the other person runs away”) continues for a few more days, until he realizes I meant what I said. I am not going to fight him. Once this is clear, he gives up inviting me to get my face punched, and instead just seethes in my direction.

  After a few more days I can feel the tension between us ease. Yes, it was an unfortunate turn of events that day in gym class, but such things happen between gentlemen, and I am confident we will soon be back on friendly terms. Or, if not friendly, perhaps we will achieve a cool equanimity.

  When I think about it further, I come to believe that Dale is most likely as relieved as me that there is to be no fight. Sure, he was steamed at the time, but deep down, I bet Dale is just as afraid of me as I am of him. Yes I’m on the small side but Dale must have detected a certain wiry toughness in me. In fact, the more I consider the way things unfolded, the more likely it seems that Dale is actually afraid of me. After all, if he really wanted to fight, why not just throw a punch in the locker room? Fear. That’s why. When viewed in this way, it becomes more and more obvious that the real pussy in this whole matter is Dale.

  Unfortunately, this is not how Dale sees it.

  On Friday, I am walking back to class after lunch when I suddenly find myself propelled into the cinder-block wall. My books scatter down the hallway. I wheel around, startled and scared. It is, of course, Dale.

  “C’mon!” he yells.

  Within an instant, a circle of gleeful students has surrounded us. Oh God, we’re going to fight. Or rather, he’s going to fight and I’m going to be hit. Right here in the hallway where the maximum number of people can see me get my ass kicked.

  He lunges again, pinning his head against my chest, driving me backward, swinging at me. I stay on my feet, deflecting his blows but doing nothing to return them. Instead I wrap my arms around him, trying to keep him from hitting me, our sneakers scraping linoleum, the crowd cheering us on. I hear in my head the two words before they are, inevitably, vocalized by some faceless spectator:

  “Nerd fight!”

  While Dale and I belong to, respectively, the burnout and fag classes of our high school’s caste system, when it comes to physical altercations we both fall under the rubric of “nerd,” a term that has many meanings, but in this instance means “guys who look stupid fighting.”

  I fall to the ground and Dale leaps on top of me. Although I am under assault, my main concern now is that my shirt has ridden up, exposing my belly button and possibly my underwear. For some reason, I find this mild indignity far worse than any beating I might suffer.

  There is no pain. Dale is not strong. Dale does not know how to land a punch. Dale is a pussy just like me. But Dale is hurting me in ways he does not know, by pointing the hot spotlight of my own inadequacy right in my face. The whole school is seeing me at my most flailing and incompetent. The only thing that could possibly make it worse would be if I started to cry. Which, of course, I do.

  The tears come before I can do anything to stop them. They begin as if they are lawn sprinklers set on a timer and do not stop even when two teachers pry us apart and send the crowd scurrying. I am blubbering, choking on my tears. I do not even know why I am crying. Just because, I guess. Because that is what I do when I feel helpless. There is no point in even trying to hide my tears because it’s pointless. All of it.

  One of the teachers asks me if I am okay. I nod yes because I am currently incapable of speech, unless I want to risk falling into that hiccupy cry-talk little kids do after they’ve been spanked.

  The teachers have us each hooked at the elbow. I know what’s next: quick march down to the office, interrogation, suspension. My mom will kill me. The only upside to being suspended will be staying home by myself for a few days, even though Mom will undoubtedly give me a lengthy list of chores to fill my time. That’s what she did the time I forged her signature and then said, “Heil, Hitler” to her when she grounded me. (Tur
ns out parents, particularly Jewish parents, do not like being compared to Hitler.)

  This will be worse, though. Suspension is just a step away from expulsion. Expulsion is just a step away from homelessness. Which is just a step away from blowing dudes at the bus station for a slice of pizza.

  But the teachers do not take us to the office. Instead they make Dale and me shake hands. When we do, I can see in his eyes that we’re even now. He feels victorious and I am almost happy for him to feel that way. I almost say, “Nice job,” but I feel like it will be interpreted sarcastically, and besides, I cannot speak.

  The class bell rang a long time ago. When the teachers are satisfied we are done making violence, they send us to our classes. Me to AP lit, Dale to auto shop or wood shop or whatever vocational class he is taking to prepare himself for the world. After collecting my fallen books, I take a detour into the boys’ room to inspect myself. I am undamaged. Just kind of snotted up. I wash my face and lock myself in a toilet stall.

  While sitting there, I try to cheer myself up. It’s over. I survived. Dale got his revenge and the natural order has been restored. Yes, people will probably make fun of me a little more than usual for the next week or so, but then they’ll forget about it. As far as humiliations go, getting beat up is pretty run-of-the-mill. Certainly not as bad as getting caught jerking off in class like Sam Dewar. The girl behind him in Algebra II caught him doing it behind his textbook and screamed. Sam had to move to an entirely different town after that.

  Lucky him.

  CHAPTER 17

  i am a demographic

  Even though I used to look down on kids like Dale who took auto repair class, a huge part of me is pissed off at myself that I never bothered to learn anything about cars, since even from a young age, I admired fast-moving shiny things: rockets, trains, airplanes, cars. Especially cars. But I never bothered to learn anything about how they work, which is embarrassing. I mean, guys are expected to know something about cars; at the very least, a man should be capable of changing a tire. I cannot. All I know is that the process involves something called “lug nuts,” a piece of information I have retained because “lug nuts” is a funny thing to say.

  Nor do I know how to change the oil. I’m not even sure how to properly check the oil, although it too involves a funny word: dipstick. Honestly, I am so incompetent when it comes to cars I do not trust myself to tie a Christmas tree to the roof. I rely on Martha to do that because she is a Christian.

  But as I said, I like cars, and have always admired men who understand them. To me, there is no greater attainment a man can reach than to be able to look under the hood of a car and diagnose a busted fan belt. How I would love to say those words one time with a straight face: “You’ve got yourself a busted fan belt.” Or “Looks like you’ve got a crack in your thingy.” (See? I couldn’t even think of another appropriate engine component so I had to go with “thingy.”) How I would love to even know where the latch is to open the hood.

  My own car is a gunmetal gray 2007 BMW 328xi, and it’s the fanciest thing I have ever bought myself. Like most other actions I undertake, its purchase was accompanied by a sense of terrible shame.

  The first and most obvious reason for my shame was the financial indulgence. How could I possibly justify spending forty-two thousand dollars on a car when I had not yet saved enough money for my children’s college education?

  I could not.

  Did that stop me? It did not.

  The second, deeper level of shame had to do with my own sense of self. I just never envisioned myself being the kind of guy who would drive a car like that. Because there is a type of guy who drives an expensive, finely tuned Bavarian automobile. That type of guy is commonly referred to as a “douchebag.”

  When I am growing up in my crummy town house in my crummy New Jersey town, there is a bright young family who lives next door. The family is headed by an eager middle-manager-looking guy named Bill. He’s got a beautiful brunette wife and two beautiful, popular daughters who have straight white teeth perfected by years of pricey orthodontia.

  Sometimes in the morning I see Bill leaving for work. He always wears a suit and he’s got the same crispy, swept-back hairstyle as the local news anchor. From our upstairs bedroom window, I watch him trot out of his house, his tan leather briefcase dangling from his arm like a magician’s assistant.

  Where he goes, what he does, I don’t know. I imagine he’s got “clients” and “accounts.” He probably has a secretary, and he probably says to her, “Get my clients on the phone! I need to speak to them about their accounts!”

  They are probably screwing while he says this.

  At around six each night, he returns to his house and all his winsome girls. I imagine them in their snug home eating a fine meal. I imagine our family is a frequent topic of conversation, and when they talk about us, I imagine them laughing and laughing and laughing.

  For years, I watch Bill’s comings and goings, and every time I think to myself, That guy is a douchebag. His car of choice: a BMW.

  The car represents an aspirational lifestyle to which I do not aspire. I do not want to be like all the world’s Bills and Chets and Rogers, guys with meaty handshakes and office football pools. Not that there’s anything wrong with guys like that. It’s just that they are all, as I said, douchebags.

  The life I envision for myself does not hold fancy cars. When I think of my own future, I imagine I will be like one of the kids from the movie Fame, a perpetually teenage artist singing and dancing on high school cafeteria tables and the roofs of New York City taxicabs.

  I will be pure, untouched by the feverish demands of corporate America. Yes, I will be poor, but happily so. My friends will all be artists of one kind or another: modern dancers and sculptors and jazz pianists, and probably some of them will overdose on heroin or jump off bridges. It will all be so tragic that the rest of us will not know what to do, so we will console each other with sex.

  I will spend my days sitting on the windowsill of my tiny bohemian apartment writing long poems, which will be beautiful, yes, but also hypermasculine. They will have metaphoric titles like “Tribeca Slaughterhouse, 3 a.m.” I will never show these poems to anybody, yet they will somehow become world-famous.

  In a world unbound by society’s rules, there will be no place for fancy cars. Because everybody knows that fancy cars are for guys like Bill. Sellouts. Dopes. Squares.

  So a couple of decades later, when I find myself walking into the gleaming BMW dealership, my own beautiful wife and kids in tow, I find myself looking over my shoulder. For what, I am not sure. Possibly my younger self giving me the finger.

  Compounding my shame is the fact that I already own two perfectly good cars. Yes, they are getting old, but both remain operable. The first is a hulking Jeep Grand Cherokee that we bought before people cared about the earth. The second is my Volkswagen New Beetle, purchased because Martha thought it was cute. Originally the car was hers, but now that we have two kids, it has become mine. I have never felt as defensive about a possession as I do about that Beetle.

  “It’s not a girl’s car,” I tell people. They don’t even have to suggest otherwise for me to tell them this. I say it reflexively. Sometimes I say it when giving my order at the McDonald’s drive-thru.

  “Can I take your order?”

  “It’s not a girl’s car.”

  But it is a girl’s car. Moreover, it is a young girl’s car. It is the Justin Bieber of automobiles. It’s like driving around in a copy of Seventeen magazine. When you honk the horn, it squeals. It’s simply not an appropriate vehicle for a fully grown, ruggedly handsome man such as myself. The car is nothing more than a smooth round bump; it looks like a shaved vagina.

  I spend five years driving that car. Five years of slouching down in my seat while idling at stoplights beside attractive women in Porsches or Jags. Finally I cannot take it anymore. I need a sexier car, a man’s car. I need a BMW.

  Wandering around the sho
wroom, I feel like a fraud. I mean, I’m obviously not the kind of guy who hangs out in BMW showrooms. I’m obviously nothing like the other thirty-something white guys here with their families, all of them pretty much dressed exactly like me. Those other guys, they’re everything I’m not. Just look at them, with their … shoes?

  I admit, it may not be easy to differentiate us based on appearances. But I need to hold on to the idea that I am not exactly like these other guys. I need to believe that I fall outside the boundaries of some market-tested demographic. This idea, that I am somehow different, is central to my entire sense of who I am. Yet here I am wandering around what appears to be a gathering place for people who are exactly like me. All of us the same. The only consolation I have is that we are all pretty good-looking.

  Worse, if I squint, we could all be my neighbor Bill twenty-five years ago.

  I need to get out of here.

  “Can I help you?” A saleswoman is at my side. She does not seem to care that I have just come to the earth-shattering realization that I am a demographic.

  Can she help me? I don’t know. What can she do for panic attacks?

  I mention to her that I might, possibly, be interested in a car. Do I have a specific model in mind? I shrug. Perhaps, maybe, the newly redesigned 328 six-cylinder all-wheel drive coupe that Car and Driver magazine just called “Best in Class”? Maybe that one? Not that I’ve spent every night for the last two months online researching it or anything.

  “Of course,” she says, leading me to a sparkly model on the showroom floor. We stand beside it and I nod as she spends the next ten minutes discussing weight distribution and gear throws and the new ventilated all-disc brakes. Uh-huh. I have no idea what she is talking about. Mostly I just want to lick it.

  As stupid as I feel listening to her blather on, I am keen on not appearing stupid. So I assume my wide Car Guy stance. Feet shoulder width apart, arms folded over each other, face set into a concentrated grimace. This is the position I take when people talk to me about things that guys are supposed to know about: cars, football, fishing, any kind of mechanical system. I want her thinking to herself, From the way he is nodding and standing with his feet shoulder width apart, I can tell this guy really knows his shit.